Makro online order chaos

Makro has blamed Black Friday-beating shopping demand during its August birthday celebrations for a surge in complaints from customers over the past two months.

Hundreds of Makro customers have recently complained about significant delays in online order deliveries, slow refund processing, poor customer service, and receiving incorrect, incomplete, or faulty items in their orders.

MyBroadband was made aware of the issues after a reader emailed a complaint and highlighted the problems with refunds.

The reader accused Makro of stealing their money by not refunding them after an unfulfilled delivery.

“Makro support just says they take it up with the financial department, but nothing ever happens — no delivery and no refund,” the user complained.

He pointed MyBroadband to the consumer sentiment gauging platform Hellopeter, where we noticed hundreds of complaints in just the last two months.

From 1 August 2024 to 22 September 2024, Makro garnered over 700 1-star reviews on its Hellopeter portal, which translates to about 13 highly negative reviews per day.

Over the same period, just 26 customers left 5-star reviews.

While it is more likely that people will complain about a bad service experience than leave compliments over a good one, the big gap seems like it should be a major cause for concern for Makro.

As of Monday, 23 September 2024, Makro ranked 91st in the retail category and had an average rating of 1.34 out of 5 from 19,317 reviews.

It also had a Trustindex rating of 2.4 and a -76 Net Promoter Score, showing that customers were less than unlikely to recommend the store to others.

Many of the negative reviews in the last two months related to delayed deliveries and poor customer service regarding correcting order issues and getting refunds.

Some customers also complained about couriers not even being aware of their orders, items getting split into multiple deliveries, and orders getting cancelled without notification while payment had already been deducted.

MyBroadband asked Makro’s parent company, Massmart, for the cause of the issues.

Massmart said the retailer’s birthday promotion, which ran throughout August, attracted much higher-than-anticipated online customer activity, with volumes that exceeded last year’s Black November promotion period.

“This high-volume period also unfortunately resulted in some delays in the refund process for customers, and we have put a number of measures in place to counteract this, including adding additional support agents dedicated to this processs, as we approach the peak year-end trading period,” Massmart said.

Over 90% of orders delivered on time

Massmart said its online team had worked hard to clear the backlog and return Makro to its expected service levels, which had now been achieved.

“In the past two weeks, over 90% of Makro online orders have been delivered within the expected delivery time,” Massmart said.

The latest issues came after the company drew sharp criticism from its third-party resellers for hastily migrating to a new interim marketplace platform on 16 May 2024.

Some of the issues that the new platform created for sellers included:

• Inability to log in or change email addresses
• Lack of multiple profiles, so all the seller’s staff have to use the same login details
• Inability to create/edit listed products
• Activating/deactivating listings randomly stops functioning
• Stock quantity and prices randomly change, dropping well below their listed values
• Orders randomly getting cancelled
• Inability to view sales history on old or new portal, making proof of purchases difficult
• Missing product listings

Massmart previously told MyBroadband it was aware of the issues and said it was “sincerely sorry” for the inconvenience it had caused sellers.

“We are very focused on resolving these issues and are in close contact with our sellers to whom we are providing regular updates,” said Massmart corporate affairs head Brian Leroni.

Leroni said the interim platform would be replaced by a new feature-rich seller platform in the third quarter of 2024, with features including fee discounts, more promotional tools, and improved access to Makro marketing campaigns.

In addition, it will enable sellers to integrate their seller portal with their own systems for improved product and order management.